I've taken the rest of the week off to get some work done on the airplane.

Yesterday I set out to lay up the fibreglas for the windscreen fairing. I thought that it would take two hours of work in the morning to finish the prep work, then perhaps two more hours in the afternoon to lay up the fibreglas. Should be an easy day. :)

I didn't get done the prep work until 3 PM. Seeing that things were taking a lot longer than planned, I took a break to have a quick early dinner. I started trying to lay up the fibreglas at 3:30, but quickly discovered that my can of epoxy hardener was almost empty. I opened a new can and moved the epoxy pump to it. But I couldn't get the pump to prime properly. It keep on pumping air, then it would pump hardener for a stroke, then more air. I quickly went through five aborted attempts to mix up a batch of epoxy resin before admitting defeat.

I was trying to use the slow hardener, to get a slow cure time to allow me to use larger batches. I pulled out my can of fast hardener, and it worked fine. But I had to make small batches, which meant more time mixing, and less time working.


Things went well enough once I got going, but it took a long time. I didn't get done until 8:45 PM. The cold Heineken I had after I finished tasted great!

Here you see the complete layup, with peel ply on top to soak up the excess resin. The peel ply also removes the amine blush when you pull it off.


After lunch today I checked the layup, and it seemed to be completely cured. So I screwed up my courage and decided to pop it off. It was pretty much impossible to get a grip on anything, so I eventually used the edge of a chisel to get between the lower edge of the layup and the vinyl tape. It came off without too much difficulty once I got it started.


You can see a few small voids, but this part doesn't take too much load, so they don't worry me. The idea of using several layers of electrical tape to mark the planned edge worked well. There is a very distinct ridge line that I will use as a trim mark. I used four layers of electrical tape, but three would seem to be more than sufficient.